Rand Paul says, “I would have voted no on the Iraq War.” He also says, in a video posted prominently on his campaign website, that he’ll push for formal declarations, with House and Senate votes, before the launch even of wars he might favor. He says that while national defense is the top responsibility of government, conservatives who are serious about reducing waste must be wary of the excesses of the military-industrial complex. Add on criticisms of the Patriot Act and a willingness to cross partisan lines, and you can see why Rand Paul gets Cheney’s goat.

What really troubles Cheney and his circle, according to the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, is the prospect that a Paul win would begin to crack the false facade of party unity on military intervention. “That’s an issue the GOP establishment doesn’t want an open debate on,” says Boaz, who suggests the neocons “desperately fear that [electing] a conservative anti-interventionist leader on foreign policy just might reveal that a lot of Republicans and conservatives…don’t buy the world-policeman foreign policy the Bush/Cheney administration imposed on the GOP.”

The NeoCon-controlled Republicans are terrified now of The Tea Party, and they’re decidedly nervous that Ron Paul could become the movement’s leader. Sarah Palin as a leader of the Tea Party, they could handle her, and through her, most of the movement. But Rand Paul is something else altogether, and much closer to the roots of the Tea Party.